Friday, June 15, 2012

Perspective: This Election Should be About JOBS,JOBS, JOBS!!!


Everyone knows a relative or friend who has lost a job or is about to lose one or is being forced into early and unwanted retirement. Therefore, jobs and how to create them is of paramount importance to all voters. Our Presidential candidates should be talking about realistic specific and detailed plans, which can be expressed in every-day language, just how they would deal with this issue. Unfortunately neither Obama nor Romney is doing that!. We don’t expect Obama to lay out such a plan because he is a no-nothing, no-experienced ideologue. Romney could, should and must!! But so far he hasn’t! A sensible plan would resonate with every voter regardless of party. Romney needs to be pressured to state his plan, and the sooner the better.

The good news regarding the jobs issue is that we are within five years or so of having a shortage of workers. For perspective, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire at the rate of 10,000 per day. The Boomer generation consists of 80 million persons ranging in age from 48-66, but there are only 40 million in the next generation whose ages range from 32-47. So it is clear that there will be a shortfall of workers in the next 5-10 years.

Right now there is a shortage of U.S. workers who have majored in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, so-called STEM. These jobs are critical to the development of and maintenance of the digital technology that is already in place and is a growing segment of the jobs market. One idea to fill this shortage is to employ persons from China who have been educated in America. This is an outrage when you consider that student loans now exceed one trillion dollars, and currently one in two college graduates have majored in fields for which there are no jobs.

To devise a plan, one must first define why jobs are returning at such an anemic rate from the Great Recession of 2008. A key reason, but not being discussed, is that digital devices have replaced more U.S. jobs during the past five years than have our global competitors. Anyone who is not asleep has to have noticed that robots answering phones and ATM machines dispensing cash have already replaced humans. The Kindle and similar e-book devices a mere four years old are in the process of eliminating every part of the traditional paper book industry from log to library. Meanwhile, our Military are using pilot-less drones to pinpoint and kill our enemies. Then while we weren’t watching or being informed by the Media or our Representatives, the Digital Revolution has produced a driverless car that has driven one thousand miles with a blind man as the only passenger, and IBM has produced a computer that can search historic documents better than humans. Do you think the elimination of fork lift driver and paralegal jobs are and far behind? Recently the CEO of Google, acknowledging that the rate of adoption of digital devices is accelerating, stated that we are only about “ONE PERCENT” along the way!! I capitalized those two words on purpose so we would burn that number into our brains, because we haven’t seen anything yet.

So, why are robots preferred to human workers? Simply stated, they work 24/7 which equates to four times as many hours per year as a human can work. In other words one machine could replace four humans. In addition these digital devices make fewer errors than humans, require no healthcare, pensions, vacations, maternity leave, have no egos that have to be assuaged, and don’t join unions. Finally, they can be fired at will, without severance pay, advance notification or legal expenses in the event that a better machine comes along. The bottom line is that the total cost per hour of a digital machine is significantly below the cost of a US human laborer. That is why we are experiencing the paradox of no job growth while corporations are profitable in a weak market. Productivity is up and labor costs are down.

The United States leads the world in digital technology development and application , and we should turn this lead to our advantage. The labor costs of digital equipment in the US can be equal to or below foreign labor. With that advantage, and with a smart US policy, we could keep manufacturing jobs from leaving the US, and in addition, we could attract jobs back to the United States that were lost to low cost overseas labor.

The second item to consider in the development of a plan is to review our assets and determine how they might fit a jobs creation plan.

Assets:

1. We have the best university education system in the world to create the STEM graduates we need for the digital age.

2. We have the largest reserves of natural gas in the world

Job Creation Plan:

1. Create a US Government/Private Investor program to convert all Cars, Trucks, Buses, Other Vehicles and Gas Stations from gasoline and diesel fuels to compressed natural gas (CNG) by 2024

• Make low interest loans to Private Investors, automotive owners and gas station owners for the purchase of capital equipment required to make CNG conversions

 Permit rapid tax write-off of Private Investor capital required for the transportation of CNG to the distribution locations.

 Waive for a period of ten years any US government mandate or regulation that impedes the plan. This includes, but is not limited to, regulations which prohibit drilling, fracking or transporting of natural gas on private property, US government lands and wildlife habitats.

2. Focus educational financial support on those students who major in STEM

• Develop programs to encourage females, who represent about 55 % of college graduates, to increase the percentage who graduate with majors in STEM from the current 6 % to 15% within 4 years (2016)

3. Promote the development and implementation of digital devices

• To reduce our labor costs to a level equal to or below those of China and other developing countries.

Benefits of the Plan:

1. Using our natural gas gets us off foreign oil and the fluctuations in oil price caused by speculators. Environmentally, natural gas is cleaner burning than gasoline and diesel fuels and produces less carbon dioxide, as well. Moreover, getting off foreign oil would strengthen the dollar.

2. Unemployed Baby Boomers can be given jobs immediately that do not require the high skills of the digital revolution

3. We should focus college degrees on real jobs such as those in STEM versus those in fields where there are no jobs.

4. The substitution of digital devices reduces the advantage that low labor costs the Chinese and other developing countries have

5. The maintenance of digital devices requires high skills, and thus pays well.

6. Because we are educating our children in digital technologies from K-12, they are in the best position of any of their generation in the world capable of imagining where digital devices can be applied and how to maintain them, thus giving the US a competitive advantage over foreign competitors for the rest of the 21st century.

Governor Romney could and should endorse this plan as soon as possible because such a plan would resonate with every potential voter, and the plan could be implemented within six months of a President’s taking office.

The mantra for this plan should be:

Take Back America

Abab Oil NO…US Gas YES


Romney must avoid at all costs being distracted by Obamas’s attacks on how large his LaJolla house is or claiming that Republican men are the reason why women cannot get contraceptives or are paid less than men for the same job. Most importantly of all, he must not get into any environmental donnybrook regarding the alleged connection between the use of fossil fuels and global warming. The jobs issue is a here and now crisis; whereas any serious harm from man-made global warming, if it exists, is decades if not centuries away.